Newspaper Article

When Online Hearsay Intrudes on Real Life

Schwartz, John

2001

Overview

The nightmare for Mr. [Dmitry Pruss] was based on things he had never written. A Russian scientist working at the National Institutes of Health on an ''exchange scholar'' visa in the early 1990's, Mr. Pruss would take part in online discussions with other expatriates of the former Soviet Union on Usenet, a worldwide network that held thousands of discussions on most every conceivable topic. (Usenet, which operates like a bulletin board on which people post messages and others read and respond to them over time, predates the World Wide Web, having been first developed in 1979 by Duke University researchers.) The groups that focused on Russian themes were known to be among the rougher neighborhoods of the online world, where participants would exchange angry messages in ''flame wars,'' as they are known; the scheming that ensued was tinged with a bitterness worthy of a Politburo purge. Mr. Pruss still does not know why his attacker chose him. What he does know is that one day in 1994, an allusion he made to the Holocaust from his government agency account was taken out of context and reposted in a vicious note sent to hundreds of newsgroups, especially those devoted to discussion of Jewish topics. The attack message against Mr. Pruss read in part: ''As a religious Jew I am OUTRAGED that my tax money is used to pay for Internet access for the notorious Jew-hating Russian punk.'' It included contact information for officials of the National Institutes of Health. Ultimately, Mr. Pruss said, his employers determined that he was not at fault, although they took away his online account and ordered him to submit to psychiatric counseling. They did, however, renew his work visa. N.I.H. officials refused to comment, except to confirm that Mr. Pruss had been employed as a molecular biologist on a temporary visa at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Background checks / False information / Internet / Invasion of privacy / Meeks, Brock / Pruss, Dmitry